I stood in this grocery store in Africa and I thought to myself, you know why why is looked different here?
Mike Giller is the founder and CEO of Mike's Organic, the Greenwich, Connecticut based organic food market and food delivery service. Founded in two thousand and nine. Mike decided to start up his business after feeling unfulfilled in his corporate job working in advertising and event planning. He also ran a music studio, which I did not know, Mike Geller, I did not know you had a music studio.
Something new every time, Aretha.
Today, Mike has a thriving business which brings sustainable, healthy food to customers in store and straight to their doorsteps. Joining me at my farm to talk about sustainable, healthy food and what it takes to build a food business in a crowded and rapidly changing market is Mike Geller. Welcome to my podcast.
Mike, thank you for having me.
Finally we are sitting down to talk.
Is to be here.
I've known Mike for how many years, Netwig?
I think like five years?
Yeah, and I always enjoy reading his smiling face. You're always smiling too, which is something that I know is very hard in business.
Sometimes, but you know your outlook is everything right, and you try to get up, do a good job, be happy and do your best with that.
Well, you are now embarking on a very big project, the News store in Greenwich, Connecticut. I know your old store, and we haven't really talked about the success of that and the leading up to the new but talk about building this new store and how big is it and what kind of customer base do you have?
Sure, So, I've wanted to do this for a while, and you know, I started my business in a nine is as you mentioned, really as a home delivery service, but I always wanted to be able to interface and interact with customers. So we had the idea for a store, and this location became available that was just the perfect place to do it. It's, you know, at the corner of the busiest intersection in Greenwich, Connecticut.
So describe the corner. What's the name of it because people are going to go there.
Six hundred East Putnam Avenue and it's in the Costco area of Greenwich, you know, this big parking lot, and I wanted to create a real community place for the town, you know, place people could connect with their food meet the farmers, eat something delicious, and Greenwich really hasn't had something like that for a while since a place called Heyday, which was there. You may have been there in really
the eighties and the nineties. So we really wanted to create this beautiful market that could bring people together with their food, and that's what we've done. And we're sourcing all, you know, predominantly from small local farmers artisans, but we do everything you know, produce pasture meat, grass fed dairy, etc. It's been a big lift, a big jump, and in businesses, you know, sometimes you have to take those it's how you move forward and do more and better things.
Well, I visited there just a couple of weeks ago for the first time I had seen it under construction, and the store itself, bright and cheery, with very nice people working in the store, and rose and Rose and rose and Rose and refrigerators full of very interesting products, many products that are not available in the regular supermarket.
And I think that that's your appeal and your attraction, that you are carrying stuff that nobody else carries, and you can also explain why it's better or different than what we can get elsewhere.
Definitely, so you know, what's happened in our grocery industry in the last one hundred years is that, you know, we've kind of become a volume it's become a volume industry, right. So you walk into a twenty five thousand square foot store and there are two hundred and fifty kinds of olive oil. That's cool in one way, but it also is lacking the creation. You know, why are those products on the shelves?
Right?
So for me, my life and doing this for fourteen years, has all it's been all about sourcing. It's been finding the best things and bringing them to people. So when you walk into a store and you see a new product, you know, you need a tour guide to some degree, right, So, like we really try to do that for people too. Well.
I enjoyed my tour because because I really hadn't seen some of those products before, and I do want to know about them as So I think that's the education part of it is very important in a store like yours.
Without question, you know, when you're going to bring something different to people, there needs to be an explanation of what it is. We give people cooking instructions, you know, we tell people what's coming into season. You and I were talking a little bit before we went on about what's going on with fruit in the Northeast right now, and communicating that information not just about the product, but
about the farmers, the people that grow the food. You know, you know so well about agriculture, and I've lived it for a long time, but not everyone knows, you know, what goes into growing that tomato or growing that peach, right, and telling that story is important. But really like getting the best things under one roof, where you can go do your whole grocery shop but find like an amazing pecan butter from Nevada or an amazing locally made granola.
You know, that's what differentiates I think us and a lot of these small independent groceries from those big chains that we're very accustomed to go into it, and.
They've always appealed to me. Small, small organic markets have always appealed to me. We had the organic market in Westport, Connecticut. It was right next to my yoga studios, so I always would stop in there and see what they had and try to support their business because when you buy it a place like Mike's Organic, you actually are supporting a tremendous sort of network of young, avid good gardeners everywhere.
I'm involved with the main organic farmers up in Maine, and they are working so hard to spread the word about this kind of food and the availability of this kind of food, and to keep the ground alive where they are actually farming. How big is the store.
The store is about thirty five hundred square feet and we have packed it. It's comfortable, it's spacious, but it is packed with incredible products. We opened up on a rainy Saturday in April and we had I think over two thousand people come through during the day. It was bananas.
Is that the biggest day you ever?
That was the biggest day we ever had. We all recovered and it was also our first day.
You know.
We had trained obviously some of our cashiers and stalkers, but it's like kind of going to the driving range then playing on the golf course. Training is one thing, in the games another. It went great. We had one broken jar tomato sauce to check out, which was a little bit hairy, but other than that, it was great.
And the response has been incredible. You know, I was saying before you and I had a woman come in today and she ate a strawberry, a local strawberry brought a few today and she's from California, and she said, you know, this tastes like it did when I was a kid. And I hear that every week I've been open since I started the business, I've heard either this taste like I used to when I was a kid,
or this tastes like it used to back home. If someone's from another country and there's a reason for that, we can get into it. But there's a real reason for that.
All there is. And I have a small array of cherry tomatoes, two kinds of strawberries, the first of the cherries being cherries I love being cherries, and the apricots. I haven't tasted the apricot yet. Are they delied?
They're good? They get better, you know the thing that and you know this, I'm sure too. The first picking is never the best, and they get better and better and better throughout the season.
Right.
We're so conditioned to have everything every day of the year in this country, right in terms of produce especially, but there really is a season for things, and not all of us know what it is. But like with the apricots, mid June, you know, that's the time for them.
And cherries are these cherries from California.
These cherries are from California. They're local ones. You know, we've gotten hit pretty bad with the frost up here.
So okay, let's talk about that, because my Mike was just describing that the stone fruit, which the cherries, the plums, the peaches, the apricots, the nick dreams were very badly damaged in the frost, the late frost that we had. Even though the trees had blossomed beautifully and this is all Hudson Valley and Northeast ye had blossomed beautifully. My plum trees were incredible this year, and then we had a frost after the fruit had formed and they will
fill off. Correct, there's not a plum in my plum trees.
It's it's happened to a bunch of farmers. And again going back to it, right, like being able to tell people that information is so important. I have an incredible farmer. His name is Mark, and he's been doing this. He's the fourth generation fruit farmer in the Hudson Valley. His fruit is spectacular. I mean his peaches, the donut orches, everything's called Grinder Farm. It's in Middle Hope, New York.
I was talking to him a few days ago. He said, Mike, you know, we had a day in February that was forty two. The next day was minus ten, and then we had this lay frost and he had the fruit actually was on the tree.
Yeah, that's what happened. That's what happened.
The fruitlets, the little baby fruitlets, and a blossom can withstand. And that's one of the things is you know, with laate frost, right, a blossom can withstand twenty seven to twenty eight degrees for a night, but the fruit, which he found out from Cornell can't. So literally all of his fruit dropped off his trees. And if you're a fruit farmer, that's it for the year. It is not like tomatoes. There's no plants behind him.
And then they start to scratch their heads and wonder, maybe a subdivision is beter than a fruit orchard. That's right, And I've seen so many fruit orchards just go the way of a development. A subdivision, it happens.
And his attitude was, you know, farmers are some of the most resilient, positive people that you'll meet. I know you've met a lot and I have two. And you know, his attitude was just so incredibly. He sand you on Mike, that's farming, he said, you know you have big years the secondary cross. No, he's a fruit farmer. I mean he has apples, you know, but even his apples were hurt, which is my.
Minor I have. It started off so many apples this year. I was so happy because last year was a bad year. Yes for apples, and the same thing. They're a little bit thinner than they were. But I'm keeping my fingers crossed because apples are more resilient.
They are, and they blossom a bit later. You know, they're they're better adapted to the cold. But but yeah, that it's it's not a great story, but it's it's a good story to tell people about what's happening with the farmers, and we always have that information.
Well, how did you start? When was your interest in vegetables and fruits and locally produced stuff kindled? When did that happen.
As a child? You know, I'm half Italian, half Jewish. I'm a pizza bagel and my grandma Ida lived in the Bronx with my Grandpa Vinni. She had a little vegetable garden out back, and I used to go there and we would always be harvesting egg plant together, and we'd be cooking together, all those things. And then as a child, I just was always so fascinated by nature and the outdoors. I grew up an outdoorsman and fishing and gardening and all those things. And I just always
have loved food and especially how it's grown. I went off to.
School, and then where'd you go to school?
I went to Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. And then I moved to Atlanta and started this hip hop studio with a partner because I've always loved music as well, and you know, from there it just did all these different interesting things. I recorded Snoop when I was down there, obviously, I know, you know Snoop really well.
And then I started doing these big celebrity events, you know, with Shaquille O'Neal others, and I loved it and it was interesting advertising a few others, but I just never felt fulfilled, never loved it, you know, truly felt passionate, and never thought I was doing anything good. So I quit and I spent three and a half months living in the Kalahari Desert in Botswana in Africa.
I've been there. It is one of the most beautiful places on Earth.
I would agree.
And what did you do there?
I was building a photographic safari camp. I just wanted to get away from the world for a while. I was twenty eight years old and trying to figure out my path, and I had this burning desire to something with food, but didn't know what it was. So I went out to build this camp and I lived out there. And you know, I went to a grocery store in Mound, Botswana, which had about one hundred thousand people, and all the
food looked better than here. You know, the eggs weren't refrigerated because, as you know, when the hen lay is an egg, she puts the bluem on it and it won't spoil.
Right.
The tomatoes were small and juicy, and all these things. I stood in this grocery store in Africa and I thought to myself, you know, why, why is it looked different here? Then I went into the bush. During my time there, I was charged by a leopard, almost bitten by a cobra. In a play in the lost and engine, and I fought a two thousand acre brush fire with leafy branches. We literally put out a blazing fire with branch. Never,
I'll never forget. I'll never forget. The fire starts and with the guys, and I'm picturing like a plane flying over, you know, like for forest fires out west, and they go and they have a machine and they're cutting branches off the tree. And I was like, what the hell you guys doing, like to put the fire out? And we fought that fire for eleven hours. It was there. I get. I never, I'll never one quick one. I'll
never forget. I was standing we made a fire break to prevent the fire from gettinst the camp, and the guy who was with me said, don't let the fire across us. And it's about one hundred yards long, and I'm standing on this fire break and the fire's coming towards me and it's trying to cross you know this sand I was running back and forth. It was one hundred and fifty degrees. I'm running back. I thought I was genuinely just gonna have art.
It's actually getting you're getting singed.
I burned all over. I was coughing up black. It was absolutely crazy, but I did not let across and it was just an incredible incident really put me on the path to what I'm doing. What I'm doing now.
So where did you learn about real gardening? Did you take a job anywhere else?
I did, so, you know, I grew up doing it, as I mentioned. And then I went and I worked at Stone Barns, really and I worked with the head farmer, Jack Algier.
What a wonderful, wonderful gardener. He is incredible, incredible, so knowledgeable.
It was really it was really an eye opener for me because I knew about farming. I knew about gardening
rather and a little bit about farming. But you know, sustainable agriculture in the Northeast is something that's really evolved a lot, especially over the last you know, twenty years, let's say, and just being able to be there and every single day learned something new and practically not just reading about in a book, right being out there and seeing, you know, you plant peas on Saint Patty's Day, like I didn't know that when I started, Right, so you
start learning all these things. And I was pruning apple trees and it really that was my moment where I decided to start MIC's. I was sitting under an apple tree I just pruned, and I said, you know, I want to start a business that directly connects small, local farmers and consumers. And that was I was really one of the first people in America to start a farm to home delivery service, which is what Mike's began as and my time in Africa, my time in Stone Barns were huge factors for me.
And doing that well, that is very good experience. And the delivery service especially, I mean you sort of hit it right because COVID came and you could delivered to homes and so that really helped you a lot, and you took advantage of it in the best possible way we did.
It was a wild time for sure, being an essential business and all that. But you know, I probably had like thirty five or forty farmers tell me they would have lost their farm without Mike's Organic during that time. You know, if you're raising chickens for Grammercy tavern in the city, let's say, and they close overnight and they don't know when they're going to open, you still have your birds, right, right, So we stepped in and we
filled that void for so many small farmers. It was one of the most gratifying parts of my time in business.
Tell us about the offerings that you actually create at your own kitchen.
Definitely, So as part of this whole expansion of the business, we bought a commercial kitchen. So we're making everything from you know, passion fruit chia pudding to incredible you saw the curry chicken salad when you came in, Beautiful sandwiches, I mean organic, I plant palms on you know, wonderful soups. It's really about working with the seasons and working with the ingredients you have and being able to create something delicious but that's also healthy. We're using grass fed beef,
pasture turkey, all those things. It's so much fun to be able to create. And then we have a food truck in the back, so we do dinner on Wednesdays and we made like grass bed cheese steaks last week. We're doing breakfast sandwiches on the weekends. We have a dairy cow coming down for the kids to see. So the prepared foods are great and also a neat item. You know, people, not everyone cooks, and not everyone can cook every night, so it's important to have that.
So what's your best selling product from the news store. What's the best selling product I'd like to know.
Okay, so bananas, No, I hate to say that. It pains me so deeply to say that banana is probably number one. And then so strawberries. Blueberries os well, but on the skin less chicken breasts os well.
Right.
We actually have this really cool animal cracker from Jackson Hole called Persephone. They are delicious, like animal crackers adults. Those sell incredibly well. And then I think as you go through the seasons, right, like sweetcorn moves extremely well. And then also the dairy, like we have this incredible a two milk from Cooperstown called Family Farms Stead. The milk sells incredibly well. We're bringing chocolate milk down from a farm in Connecticut pretty soon, so I need I need.
To find a really great milk because I'm making my own yogurt now and the milk milk is not the same every week from the same dairy. It's what the cows are eating, how they feel, absolutely, and so I've been noticing it, Like my last batch of yogurt was sour.
Wow. Interesting. Yeah, when the color of the milk changes as the cows get out on the grass, right. It becomes more yellow when they're on the grass because of all those nutrients. And you can taste the grass. You can taste the terrible in the milk. It's like you can with wine. Right, So the milk changes throughout the season. And it's also everything does though, Like every week it
feels like Christmas to me. You know, it's something new comes in and you're tasting it for the first time, and eating seasonally is not easy, right, and again we're conditioned kind of not to do it now with grocery the way it is, when you get back to it, you know, it also makes it more special when you're waiting for something as opposed to just having it every day of.
The Yeah, Like I'm waiting for sour cherries.
Me too.
I love the Montmorency cherries and I love cherry pie, and I love everything.
Cherry sour cherries are. Do you like the black or the red, the red, the really tart ones? Yeah, yeah, yeah for baking, those are exception so they're amazing. Sour cherry pie might be my favorite pie.
It is my favorite.
Yeah, it has to be.
So I'm waiting for those. I do have several trees and they seem to have some fruit on them.
I'm waiting are the birds after those few? It's incredible.
I have so many birds right now too because of the climate change. So it's kind of intruing. But but you are challenged so greatly now. The small, exclusive, expensive grosser is challenged by the big, the Albertsons, the around here, the cit.
The Krogers, all of them.
Because they're all they're all competing with you and in many different ways, including price. So how do you deal with that?
It's a great question. So, well, one thing is the differentiation, right is trying to have different products. You know, if you have the same exact product as a big box store, then you know, the price becomes much more of an issue. Right, It's I'll be honest with you. You know you can't compete on price with them. You just can't.
Their margins and their volume is big, their margins are very.
China are very small, right because they've become true volume businesses. Right, the way you compete is on incredible product selection, fantastic customer service, and creating a phenomenal experience when people come in. Right, So you have a great product, you have great service, and you have something that they can do there that they can't do elsewhere. Right, we had a sheep sharing last weekend at the store. The same farmer that used to share your sheep in Westport, his daughter used to
share your sheep. So you know you have a sheep sharing. We have a fresh mozzarella maker coming on Sunday to make fresh mozzarella in the store. Right. We have the dairy cow coming with her calves. Next weekend. We have a pasta pop up. We're doing a lobster fest. You know, all those things of really getting people back to experiencing something through their food is what is what is important in it. But for the big box stores, you know, it's also killing the variety of what we have here
in this country. You know, in nineteen hundred there were six thousand varieties of apples in the US. Right after prohibition there were two thousand because people cut down apple orchards they're making hard cider. And now you see the same five or ten in every grocery store in America. Right, But that you know, for us, we'll have fifty or sixty kinds of apples in the fall so it's really great customer service, awesome products set and then creating a phenomenal experience for people.
And you, let's do a slater making day.
I want to do that with you. I'm going to get you down there.
So let's talk about these strawberries. You have local strawberries, which is it's June almost June, you're June, yeah, June. First, we have local strawberries which are small and red, and what variety are.
The early glow?
And then you have the Harry's berries which come from California. And I'm going to take a bite of the Harrys berry. And now they've really taken over from Driscoll, haven't they.
They have their you know, just like with apples. You know, there are about six hundred varieties of strawberries.
Be sure they don't inject these I with sugar. I mean, if they inject these with sugar, people.
People can't believe the flavor. And there's a really good reason for that. So, you know, typically we're growing one or two varieties commercially in this country. Albion is one of the main ones, and there's actually less sugar in those strawberries because it gives them a longer shell life, so he can get from California to Hear on a truck,
bounce around still look like a strawberry. The reason they're white through the middle typically is because they're picked green and either gassed or torched under a heat lamp to turn them red. So you've got a green strawberry that looks red that was bred to have less sugar.
Right.
Harry's berries, they grow two predominantly two types, seascape and Gaviota, which are ever bearing, so ever bearing strawberries produced throughout the whole season and loss of those, they're incredible. You can get them, you know, for a much longer time. Local strawberries two to three weeks, sometimes three.
To four weeks or are these grown in the ground or on benches?
These are grown in the ground.
They are.
Yeah, we've been out that farm.
Yeah.
And it's a phenomenal family, you know, the Green family. Harry was the grandfather. And it's also micro climate for them, you know, it's the perfect conditions to grow strawberries in. They like it. Not really higher than mid seventies during the day.
I'd say that I would say they're three times sweeter than the early glow.
They are, and they have a very high price point, you know, and that's when people come in the store. How much is it a court of course, twenty dollars.
Of the early glows seven ninety nine, big difference, huge, But if you are making a strawberry shortcake for your fancy dinner party, correct, you were going to want Harry's berries because they are clean, they are absolutely beautiful as they're jewel.
Well, you know we do this. I've said this to people before. But you know, you go to a restaurant, right and you don't think twice about paying eighteen dollars for a cocktail, right, And when people come in the store.
Some cocktails are twenty four dollars now.
Twenty four, twenty five thirty, right, So it's crazy. But we but when we see strawberries, the best strawberries potentially we've ever had, we think twenty dollars is silly. And by the way, they're both fine, but that's an alignment of value, right and for us to me eating the best strawberry you've probably ever had, that's actually good for you, that'll last long than twenty minutes, and no pesticides, they're grown certified or getting there, no pesticides.
Great, it's incredible because they're one of the fruits that would absorb pesticides.
So the top of the dirty dozen strawberries always are. I know someone that went to a commercial I won't say which farm, but a commercial strawberry farm, and he was out there in the morning they're having breakfast and there is his mist over the whole field. Is it, Oh, you're watering the strawberries And they said, no, those are all the chemicals were used, you know, So it really is food is the surest medicine or the slowest poison, right, And you know when we eat healthy, clean food and
you know this, Martha as well as anyone. You know, that is what gives us the fuel and the energy we need to sustain us. It's it's what's more important than food, right, Like there are few things that are more important. So anyways, Harris are sensational.
The tomatoes where are they from? These? These are the small cherry tomatoes. Is both the golden beautiful golden ones and.
The sun golds and larger.
Ones, larger orange red.
They're gorgeous, so tasty. So there's a really cool story about them. So greenhouses they are there, but here's the deal with them. They're from a place called long Wind Farm up and Fromont working with them for a while. They're grown in soil, they're certified organic, and they are greenhouse grown, which, of course, right another month or so, we're not gonna need greenhouse any greenhouse strawberry tomatoes. Rather, they taste like august. They taste like summer. They are
so flavorful. They're one of the things when people come in I always let them try things, and those are one of the things I have them try because it truly is an incredible tomato, and we'll have all the local ones soon, but to get them a little bit earlier from a great organic farm in Vermont is something that we definitely want to support.
Who's your customer.
Customer is typically has been a mom between the ages of probably thirty and sixty, let's say, who cares about eating good food but also wants the convenience of getting it in one place. And the prepared foods have been really important for that as well. And I think it's just someone who is food educated but also is looking to make changes in their diet, wants to incorporate better
things into their life, and also prioritizes flavor. We have the people that support local agriculture and that it's like their priority, right, But that's not the majority of the customer. It's people that want great food, that want to get it in one place, and that also want to have an experience and hear a story about it. We always say, you know, we don't sell food, We tell stories, and that really is the basis of what we do, is telling the story of the farmer and the product.
Do you have an in house peaker yet?
Yes and no. So we have this amazing woman. Her name is Ali. She was a pastry chef at eleven Madison Park in the city. So she is baking for us. It's mostly on the weekends right now, so come in. We have the sheep sharing. She baked these adorable little sheep cookies with amazing butter. They were butterfew and they were outrageous. She bakes strawberry bar pies from Mother's Day
Harry's various cakes, So she does bake. We work with some other great local bakeries Flower Water, Salt and Dairy, n Wavehill and Norwalk and others for brad sourdough all that.
On my way home from Pilates. This morning, I stopped at Elementop. Have you been there?
I love that place. Yeah.
And she's a sultan, single baker, Yeah, a woman. I think she has three kids. The place was packed, people are looking for and she's sour dough across so sour dough, whole weed and they are very tasty. Everything she makes now is very earthy and delicious, not too earthy, excellent, excellent technique. So it's prices of skyrocket. It all comes
down the price again. I mean, I really feel for people who tell me when I give them a bag full of peas from my garden, and how how absolutely grateful they are, because peas fresh peas in the in the grocery store are they cost a fortune. And asparagus from the garden taste so different from from most other asparagus, the ones that are shipped from whose where Peru, and the shipping takes its toll on the on the taste of the of the vegetable they get. But it's very,
very expensive. What are we going to do about that? This is a nationwide problem, it's a worldwide problem.
It's a big problem. It's it's a it's an especially big problem here right, because of our food system. And you know, one of the issues that you find is number one, small organic farms and medium organic farms are not subsidized by the government at all, right, so they're receiving no subsidies, whereas these larger industrial farms, there are many of them. I spent a lot of time in the Midwest, and I've been to a lot of these big you know, factories, yeah, factory farms or whether it's
just you know, ten thousand acres of GMO corn. A lot of them are living on subsidies and they're not making almost anything on the crop because the inputs are so high. You need two million dollars five million dollars combine to pick the corn, right, and all these chemicals, et cetera. So, you know, on a national level, until we start providing real assistance to smaller organic farms, those prices can't come down, right, It's just it's not something
that can happen. We can get it as low as possible, but it takes longer. You know, an average chicken from a factory farm is a twenty eight day old bird. From a chick to twenty eight days, that's how old it is. Till it's a broiler, till it's a bird you're eating, right, found, yeah, exactly. And then you have you know, these farmers raising them on the grass where it takes three or four months, so you're feeding the chicken longer, you have more labor against it, you know.
So it's really it's a very complicated and difficult issue. The best way we can change it is by supporting more and more small local farmers. Right, the more support we give them. Every time you buy something at a story, you're voting, right, you're voting for a certain type of food. And the more we vote for something that's locally grown from a great farmer, et cetera, the more support they have and the more they can get their prices down. Right.
But everything, by the way, just on ant, you know, just because of inflation. Everything is expensive now, I mean, even commodity food is expensive. We have tried as much as possible to keep the prices as low as we can, you know, we want to be affordable for people. But you also do pay for what you get, and that's part of life too, you know, like there's there's a balance there. We do a ton of stuff with the community, you know, we've worked with so many organizations to provide.
You know, perishable food is the hardest thing for people to fine, especially people that are food insecure. Things in cans or boxes are easier. So we've done a ton of work with local charities to try and bring more food to people that don't have access or the means. Michael Colin created the first grocery store in nineteen thirty in Queens and the entire principle which essentially the whole grocery industry is found that on now is pilot high,
sell it low. That's what grocery has been, right, what we've been talking about.
But the waste enormous, enormous. I was at a local grocery store the other morning. I wanted some fruit. I found a few other good things, but then I saw the shop one of the nice girls who works there going through all the fruits taking out what she was not saleable, and the big shopping carts full of barely bad I mean it was still edible. I said, oh, what are you going to do with that? And she said, oh, garbage. And so what is the attrition rate of food in
a grocery? Fresh food in a grocery store.
So it depends depends on the store. Right, for us, it's less than five percent. Now that five percent also though includes So what we would do, Mike's right, like a few things. One like we would we would have a kitchen. We have a kitchen. Yeah, so that's number one, right, Like, so when you have that kale that comes in perfect, just picked, and then it's been there for a couple of days, let's say, and it's still lovely but not as beautiful as you want it, that becomes your kale
white being soup. Right, So number one and then number two. You know, we work with a place called Food Rescue and they come several times a week. If there are things that are not really salable and they're not going to go to the kitchen, we donate everything that's good. But in the grocery industry, you know, the way there are two types of waste from the big grocery industry. One is before it even gets to the store. So a green bean has to be a certain length with
and color to go to one of those stores. Right, Like, if you look at people, you know, we're all different shapes, different sizes, right, Like, that's what life is on your plum tree out there, so they.
Have to go elsewhere, they have to throw them away.
They have to allow of them get to scarred, right, So you know, and that is this symptom of that industry which is promoting uniformity as opposed to diversity, And that, to me is one of the big problems with big grocery, right, is like, go to that plum tree out there, You're gonna see plums of all shapes and sizes. A couple have little spots on them, some will be perfect, They're all delicious. So that is the waste is a big issue in grocery. It's I mean, you want to remember
that bread was like thirty percent or something. I mean, like it's just astronoms. And then you have people in this country that don't have access to great food.
But from these big, big grocery stots, they do not go to the homeless, and they don't go to shelters. They throw them away.
The vast majority goes. I remember, you know, when I was a kid, we had like a pet goat and I went to the grocery ands, like do you have any carrots or apples that you can't sell anymore? I'll buy them from you. So no, we're not allowed to sell them if we have to throw them away, That's exactly, and I mean to it defies every aspect of logic. I know, you compost here, I compost, you know, I mean big help to the environment for sure.
So so margins on your prepared foods are much better than on grocery correct probably you know.
Prepared foods are one of those things where you're aiming for a gross margin, you know, around forty five to fifty percent, that's your gross margin, right, because then you've all your other costs against it. You know, it ends up being a much smaller net margin, which is what we're talking about the big grocery source. Prepared foods can usually be a bit better, you know, sometimes around sixty percent,
depends on what the product is. If you can use things you're at risk of losing, right, then it's a double win because a you're avoiding the waste and be you're creating a delicious product that as something on the shelves. So prepared foods are always a great driver, a margin driver, and they're just such a huge area of need for people, you know, especially with great clean organic ingredients in them, which there's not a lot of that around, not at all.
So back to the beginning, how did you finance your expansion?
Yes, so initially when I started the business, I financed it my my grandfather passed away and he left me twenty thousand dollars and that's how I started MIC's Organic and I sell fund of the business. For eleven years. In the beginning, I did everything delivered, picked up from the farms, dealt with the customers, swept the floors. It gives you such a great appreciation for what it takes
to be a small business owner. And then we went through this expansion and I actually went out and I did a fundraise, which was the first time I've ever done something like that in my life. And I raised it all from private investors to build out the retail location, to buy the kitchen, to grow out the delivery business. And it was an enormous education. It went well and we were successful, but fundraising is a second full time job, and I was doing that in addition running the business.
It was a great experience, it really was. Construction is another one, a really fun thing to go through. Everything they tell you twice as long and twice as much and you always laugh and say that's really funny, and then.
To be true.
And I went through some really hard times, you know, to get the place open. I really did. I read this great story about Walt Disney, you know, when he has had the idea for Disneyland. He was in his mid thirties living out in California, obviously, and you know, he couldn't afford to buy food. He was eating dog food, and he went to the banks to try and get a loan to open Disneyland. Have you heard the story before?
No?
Okay, if you had to guess how many times you think Walt Disney was turned down for a loan from.
The banks, oh, one hundred.
That's a very good guest. Most people say for three hundred, three hundred times. And you think to yourself, you know, on the two hundred and ninety ninth time, you know, how could he not have just quit? And it's what it teaches you about being, especially when you have a vision or a dream, right is persistence, perseverance, endurance that is And you know this as well as anyone, I'm sure like that's what itsy.
They always talk about the five d's, you know, the bad things and death, and dementia.
Yeah, yeah, disaster.
I always talk about the five pas, which are the perseverance and persistence.
And the patients picaciity.
Yeah, it's just it's incredible. But you do need that in business.
You need it in life. Yes, right, Yes, it truly is. You know, life is a river and we're all on it and you're moving with the current and sometimes it gets bumpy and sometimes it's smooth, but you keep moving forward. And then you have this beautiful store now that you see and people see the beautiful store, right, but no one ever sees what would into getting it open.
Well, your investors did. They should a lucky them because they took a calculated chance. They do one, Mike Giller, and they were going to see some very nice results.
Yes, they will thank you for saying that.
I really really think that's great. So you wrote a letter to customers each week when the pandemic began, and this ran for more than one hundred weeks.
You were in one of them.
I was, yes, So why did you do this?
It started during COVID and you know we were open, as I mentioned during you know, the entire shutdown all that, and a woman came in to shop and she walked in this or and you know, her eyes were kind of darting around, and she'd are you going to have milk? Are you going to have eggs? And she was really scared.
You know, this is March twelfth, right, So I went home and I wrote a letter and I just said, hey, you know, listen, we're to week about you know, around ten thousand people on our newsletter, and I said, you know, we're here for you. Whether it's for a bag of rice or a good conversation, you know, we're all going to get through this together, and we are here for you.
And the response was incredible. And then it just morphed into this incredible chance to talk to people every week about things completely outside the business, about my kids growing up, or about farmers, or about you know when you were on there about I think it was for National Women's Day. And you know, it's so hard to connect with people on an emotional level as a business owner, right, it's
so challenging. And the response we got the people people would literally I'd see people in wherever in the street and they would say, I cried, you know when I read your letter. And we did them for over two years. It was just it became such an integral part of the business and for me personally, like we started putting together a little book of them, something that really was extraordinarily meaningful.
And they will pay attention and they will come in when the first local sour cherries. I will be down in Greenwich right away.
We'll be there for you.
Oh yes. So the words connection and transparency are very important in your kind of business out come.
Because those things are almost entirely devoid in our industrial food system.
Right.
So you're lucky to know the country of where something came from in a grocery store. Forget about the farmer, what's on it, what's in it when it was picked. Right, it's going back to what we're accustomed to when we were younger. Or certainly if you go to the market, let's say in France, right where you're talking to the person that made the bread, right, and we've just lost that in our food system. We're so divorced from food, from how it's grown, all those things. So for us.
Don't have an idea what ruberb looks like.
Someone thought it was salary, right, I mean, like you know or that the right you know or whatever you know, it's illegal to publish a photo of the inside of a commercial slaughterhouse in America. It's illegal because if people saw what was happening on that level, right, like, maybe they wouldn't want to eat meat. So for us, it's really important to connect people to their food, not just to their food, but to the people that grow the food.
And then the transparency of again, what's on it, what's in it? When was this picked? You know? How do I cook this? Right?
Like?
Those are all things that we as consumers should be entitled to and we just don't. You know, you go into a grocery store, and I would argue that it's one of the worst retail experiences in America is a grocery store. There is typically you're walking in, not talking to anyone, getting everything you can. It's like going to the NV get everything you can quickly and trying to get out. That's not how we should be shopping for fee.
Do you know how I shop in a grocery store? No, tell me, Well, I like to go like at eleven o'clock at night, and I go up and down every single aisle and I look at all the prices and I compare product to product. That's the way I shop. We're lucky around here. We have one kind of local, family owned business that's really kind of Everybody talks about it how nice it is, and even the cheeses are nice.
But it's I compare. And then I read things like in the New York Times they have the consumer reports there that they have wirecutter. It's called Yesterday they had olive oils, the olive oils that they talked about the five or six of the best olive oils that they have found out of two hundred they tested. I only knew one, and one of them's in a kind of a plastic squeeze bottle and that was their number one pick.
And I was shocked that that's their number one. But they I'm going to get it and see what it tastes.
Like, Yeah, we sell that all.
Which one is that it's called grosa and that's right, Yeah, you are a z so if you have it, then it must and they said it's number one. Okay, well let's stitch. You know where is it from?
Grosses from Spain and grassa means grease and Spanish, and yeah, we it's it's phenomenal. There are two sizes, ones for cooking, ones for kind of dust on.
The soft bottle, because it's I think.
It was just a brilliant marketing decision because a lot of people, a lot of like, if you're a chef, you're always transferring it to a squeeze bottle so you can regulate how much oil are you using. Typically of course you want it in glass, right, and they put it in plastic. It is very very good oil, and it is very convenient.
I'm gonna buy some.
I would have brought you some find on that I'm sure like just olive oil in general.
Yes, she's so confusing, and I just want to talk about your events too, because you talk about having the cow and the calf to come. Because people don't have a clue what a milk cow looks like, do they? And and how does how to get actually get milk out of an udder? I try very hard to to educate young people in all of that, because my grandchildren love milking cows and cheap and goats. Hard hard to do, but once you know how, you know where your milk's coming from.
Yeah, we were actually I was at that farm yesterday. It's a farm called Shaggy coos in Easton, Connecticut. Amazing female farmer named Brittany. She's so wonderful, and she has these gorgeous Jersey and Holstein cows, and I milk the cow yesterday.
Aren't they beautiful jerseys?
The jerseys, the eyelash.
Beautiful Jersey cows are brown. Hole steins are black and white, so that you can differentiate. But the Jerseys, whole stings give more milk correct and one hole steam can give up to eighty gallons of milk a day, unbelievable. And then a Jersey cow gives less milk. I learned all of this from a farmer up in Maine who had her own dairy farm, and the only dairy farm unmountains are Island. There used to be like eighty dairy farms
on Mount Dessert Island, and now there's none. If she went out, she went out of business.
Dairy farming is a very very very hard, very.
Hard business, and cows make a mess, they do.
I was milking cows yesterday and getting pushed around by one. I wanted.
I wanted so much to have two really good rich milk cows so that I could make cheese here. Sure, and I have put it off and put it off because the mess.
They're they're hey, they're gigantic. You stand next to the we're huge. They do make a big mess. They are amazing animals though, And she actually has a for people at home. You know, the hole sting that's like the Ben and Jerry's cow, like if you think about what a whole stee looks like. And then the Jerseys make the A two milk, which has been this whole thing. You know, the A two milk is actually easier for your body to digest. It only comes pretty much from
Jersey cows. So yeah, this woman, Brittany's coming down on June tenth to the store. She's bringing the mom named Pearl and the two calves, and then we're going to be drinking chocolate milk that is right from her cows.
Wow, what kind of chocolate does she use?
She uses this gray cacow. I have to ask her what the name? What the name was? Yeah, but it was I mean it was like it was like drinking our chocolate.
But again, listeners, if you have kids, what a nice opportunity to see where your milk comes from. I look at that carton of milk on my counter or the bottle, and I think, gosh, like even this morning I was opening I had one that had a little bit of milk left in it. And I make a cappuccino every morning, but the just opened carton of milk makes a better capuccino than the one that still has just a little bit in the bottom of it. Yeah, it's just weird.
But I think once air hits it or something, is that what happens.
It is, Yeah, the air gets to it. And the other thing, you know, Brittany was telling us about was just pasturization, right, Like you know, ultra pasteurized milk, which is what you'll typically get at the grocery store, is cooked to one hundred and eighty five or one hundred and ninety degrees for an hour and a half, so it's essentially boiled, right, it's just below boiling. Right, you've taken everything out of it. It'll then last over two months, right.
So the way she's pasteurizing a lot of these small farmers do, probably the woman and makes that's right. It is just homogenizing exactly. And it's low temperature pasteurized one hundred and forty degrees for thirty minutes, which makes it safe, but all the amino acids, all theres are still intact. And that's a totally believable, big difference in it.
And you can't make good yogurt unless you have that kind of.
That is exactly right.
So speaking of marketing, who handles that for you?
Yeah, so you know a lot of it. I have an incredible kind of social media and communications team to wonderful people named Michelle and Laura, and you know, I think it really comes down to trying to be earnest and genuine with people, especially with food. Right, people spot
spot a lack of authenticity and food so quickly. So listen, when you're a small business, right, you don't have a marketing department, you know you don't have you know you have to It's always about doing as much as you can with what you have, right, and then as you grow, ideally you bring on more and more people to help you grow.
Where would you like to take your business?
Really and truly, you know, I see a big opportunity for something like what we're doing, and you know, I think that I'd like to start off, you know with Fairfield and Westchester County and opening more stores, growing our home delivery business I really want to expand into the consumer package good space with our products which can be sold at a larger level, and just really and truly continue to support as many small farms as possible to help this local food movement grow and be an anchor
for it in this area. That's kind of one of my main priorities.
To learn more about Mike's Organic, visit Micsorganic dot com, follow at Mike's Organic on Instagram, and if you happen to be in Greenwich, Connecticut, visit a store at six hundred East Putnam Avenue. You will not be disappointed and you will eat a beautiful, beauty a full court.
Is this a court?
A court of Harry's berries? I have eaten half of won during this podcast. Thank you so much for visiting and very very good luck with your amazing enterprise.
Thank you for having me, Martha. It's always a pleasure.
Thank you,